History of Photography

Photography: Technology and Cultural Force

The lecture presents photography as both a technology for recording light and a cultural force that has reshaped memory, identity, evidence, art, and power. The word photography combines Greek roots meaning “light” and “writing.”

The history of photography, the lecturer argues, is not simply a sequence of improved cameras. Each technical change altered who could make images, how widely images could circulate, and what people trusted them to show.

From Projected Image to Permanent Photograph

• The camera obscura, literally a “dark room,” had been used for centuries. Light entering through a small opening projects an inverted image onto the opposite surface. Artists could use the projection as a drawing aid, but the image disappeared when the light or setup changed.
• The central early challenge was permanence: fixing a projected image onto a surface so it would last.
• In 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph described in the lecture. He used bitumen of Judea on a pewter plate and exposed it in a camera obscura for about eight hours. The long exposure made the image blurry, but it remained—a major breakthrough.

Early Photographic Processes and Reproduction

Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype, using a silver-plated copper sheet treated with iodine vapor and developed over heated mercury vapor. Announced in 1839, the process produced highly detailed images and, according to the lecture, was made available to the public without patents.

The daguerreotype had several limitations: each image was unique, copies could not be made from a negative, and the delicate plates needed protection under glass. The mercury involved also made the process hazardous to photographers.

In the early 1840s, Henry Fox Talbot developed a negative-positive process that made photography reproducible: a negative could be used to create multiple positive prints. The lecture contrasts the daguerreotype’s sharp, singular image with Talbot’s repeatable image and connects this reproducibility to Walter Benjamin’s argument that mechanical copying diminishes an artwork’s unique presence, or aura.

Photography Becomes More Accessible—and Becomes a Witness

In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer’s wet-plate collodion process made photographs faster, sharper, and less expensive. Plates had to be coated, exposed, and developed while still wet, so photographers needed to work quickly and often carry portable darkrooms.

The lower cost helped make portraiture more accessible. Carte de visite portraits—small, inexpensive mounted photographs—were collected, exchanged, and sent to family, though access remained shaped by class and race.

Photography also became a form of documentary witness:

• Matthew Brady and his teams photographed the American Civil War, showing audiences images of battlefields and soldiers rather than relying solely on heroic painted depictions.
• Jacob Riis used flash photography to document New York tenement life. His photographs and lectures, including How the Other Half Lives, contributed to calls for social reform.

The lecture links this documentary role to later images of poverty, war, displacement, and crisis. Photographs can provide evidence and prompt public response, but their meaning and use are shaped by social power.

Photography as Art, Motion Study, and Social Perspective

Photography was initially questioned as art because a camera, rather than a hand, appeared to make the image. Julia Margaret Cameron challenged this view through expressive portraits. Her soft focus and long exposures—criticized by some as technical shortcomings—are presented as deliberate artistic choices.

Eadweard Muybridge used multiple cameras and tripwires to photograph a galloping horse in sequence. The images clarified the horse’s movement and, when viewed rapidly, suggested motion—an important precursor to cinema.

Photographers have also used the medium to shape how people and events are seen:

• Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother became an emblematic image of Depression-era hardship.
• Ansel Adams used highly controlled landscape photography and the zone system to plan tonal values in a final print.
• Henri Cartier-Bresson described the decisive moment: the brief instant when gesture, composition, and meaning align.
• Diane Arbus photographed people often pushed to society’s margins, asking viewers to confront rather than look away.
• Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl became a widely recognized image associated with the human consequences of war.
• Sebastião Salgado photographed labor, migration, and famine with a formal dignity traditionally reserved for powerful subjects.
• Cindy Sherman used self-portraiture and invented personas to question identity, performance, and what viewers see when they look at a photograph of a person.

Kodak, Digital Photography, and the Smartphone

In 1888, George Eastman’s Kodak camera made photography simpler for consumers. Users took pictures and sent the camera to the company for processing. Its slogan was, “You press the button, we do the rest.” The lecture presents this as a shift from photography as a specialist craft to an everyday activity.

In 1975, Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built an early digital-camera prototype. The lecture describes it as bulky, low-resolution, and slow, and notes that Kodak did not pursue the technology aggressively because it threatened the film business.

Digital cameras and smartphones vastly increased the number of images made and shared. The lecturer estimates that roughly 1.8 trillion photographs are made each year today.

Smartphone photographs are often computational: software combines exposures, sharpens edges, reduces noise, and may generate details that were not clearly captured in a single exposure.

Social media made photographs a form of social currency. The selfie turns the camera toward the photographer and blurs the distinction between image-maker and subject. Meanwhile, bystanders with phones can publish images of events almost immediately.

Truth, Ethics, and Visual Culture

AI-generated images and deepfakes challenge the long-standing assumption that a photograph records light from a real event. The lecture argues that this makes questions of photographic truth especially urgent.

The lecture also draws on several thinkers:

• Roland Barthes is invoked for the photograph’s connection to what was—and to death, memory, and loss. His idea of the punctum describes a detail in a photograph that personally “pierces” or affects the viewer.
• Susan Sontag is cited for examining the ethics and power dynamics of photographing others, and for warning that people can mistake photographing an event for having experienced it.
• Walter Benjamin’s idea of aura frames the consequences of making images mechanically reproducible.

The broader lesson is that photography expanded access to image-making but did not escape the power relations of the societies using it. Images can document, persuade, represent, mislead, or exclude.

Chronology Highlighted in the Lecture

• 1826: Niépce’s permanent photograph, made with an approximately eight-hour exposure.
• 1839: Daguerre’s process announced to the public.
• 1841: Talbot’s negative-positive process enables multiple prints.
• 1848: Photography arrives in India, as stated in the lecture.
• 1851: Archer’s wet-plate collodion process.
• 1861–1865: Brady’s Civil War photographs.
• 1870s: Muybridge’s motion studies.
• 1880s–1890s: Riis documents New York tenements.
• 1888: Eastman introduces the Kodak snapshot camera.
• 1930s: Lange’s Migrant Mother and Adams’s landscape work. The lecture also mentions Land’s Polaroid in the 1940s.
• 1950s onward: Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” becomes influential; color photography becomes increasingly common.
• 1975: Sasson’s digital-camera prototype.
• 1985: McCurry’s Afghan Girl appears on the cover of National Geographic.
• 2010 onward: Instagram and social media turn photographs into rapidly circulating social objects.
• Today: Images are captured, edited, enhanced, and generated digitally, complicating photography’s claim to be direct evidence.

Reflective Exercise

The lecturer asks students to choose a photograph from any era and consider:

• What does the image assume the viewer already knows?
• What does it take for granted?
• What lies outside the frame?

Speakers and Sources Featured

Speaker: One unnamed lecturer; no other speaker is identifiable in the subtitles.

Theorists and writers cited: Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida); Susan Sontag (On Photography); Walter Benjamin (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”); John Berger (Ways of Seeing).

Inventors and technical figures mentioned: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce; Louis Daguerre; Hippolyte Bayard; Henry Fox Talbot; Frederick Scott Archer; George Eastman; Steven Sasson; Edwin Land.

Photographers and artists discussed: Vermeer; Matthew Brady; Julia Margaret Cameron; Eadweard Muybridge; Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives); Dorothea Lange; Ansel Adams; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Diane Arbus; Steve McCurry; Sebastião Salgado; Cindy Sherman.

Other named person discussed: Florence Evans Thompson, the subject of Lange’s Migrant Mother.